He looked forward along the length of his ship, an uninvited wistfulness in eye and curve of lip. “Aye, Ruth, they do,” he said. Then, with his mirthless laugh, he added: “Lord knows why!”
She wondered, when she was alone, why she felt so drawn to the man. He personified, she thought, those brutalities which she should condemn; yet she liked him, admired him—and something more. There was a tenderness in her for Black Pawl that she could neither define nor deny. It increased her wonder, even frightened her a little. She told the old missionary of this; and he explained:
“There’s fundamental good in him; that is all. In spite of himself, Black Pawl is a fine, good man.”
When she and Darrin were together, she made him tell her about Black Pawl; and nothing more delighted Darrin. For he loved Black Pawl; and the man he painted for the girl was of heroic proportions and Viking strength, and the stories he told of his exploits were like legends. Ruth asked him, one day, what Black Pawl’s name had been, and Dan told her. “He was christened Dan; and his son too,” he said.
She smiled with surprise. “Three of you Dans about the Deborah; and all officers!” Her eyes clouded thoughtfully, and she fell silent. She remembered a thing her mother had once said to her. “Trust a man named Dan,” her mother had said. “They’re good men, Ruth. It goes with the name.”
She had wondered, then, whether her father had been named Dan, and asked her mother. The woman shivered faintly, and said: “No; Michael he was—Michael Lytton, Ruth. Never forget that name.”
Her mother had told her very little about this man who had been her father. He had died, she said, when Ruth was still a baby. Thought of him came to her now; then she put the thought aside and fell to talking to Dan Darrin again, and their talk ran on and on.
“Trust a man named Dan,” her mother had said; and she had trusted and liked Dan Darrin from the beginning. She was a girl; a girl’s fancies run very tenderly on such things as names.
Yet she had not at all the same feeling toward Red Pawl, even though his name were also Dan. She disliked him; and his insistent companionship annoyed her. Sometimes she was hard put to be rid of him.
Black Pawl perceived this, one morning when she turned away from the mate with hot cheeks and hurried below; and his eyes, as he looked on his son thereafter, were lowering.